Potero and the Cloud Slippers

Potero had taken the wrong train. Again.

    He got off at this wrong station, which was miles from his intended destination, and stood on the platform in a funk. Too annoyed to look for another train just yet that would take him to his right stop. Running through his brain was every curse he knew, and several more he invented just for now. With these, in his mind, he knocked several virtual bells out of the designers and engineers of the London Underground, for allowing him to lead himself so very far out of his own way.

    This was very unfair to the London Underground, because it wasn’t the one who didn’t pay proper attention to where it was going and, while it was used to people grumbling about it, today it felt enough was enough and that it was time to fight back.

    Suddenly, the concrete platform and its yellow safety-lines and chewing gum pockmarks under Potero, who was still standing in his funk upon it, began to heave as if there was earthquake beneath. Potero shrieked and fell to his hands and knees. Beneath his fingers cracked and jagged fissures formed.

    Eventually the commotion ceased, and Potero pulled himself back onto his feet warily, and looked around for a way out beyond the havoc of people and immanently falling masonry. But before he could move towards the exit sign showing a little green man poised to run, he became aware of something odd happening to his feet. They hurt, and it seemed like they were growing.

    At first his shoes became tight, in fact, painfully so. Then, just as the pain became unbearable, they split around the soles, and in a moment of incredible relief, his toes flopped out onto the platform. Yet they still grew. The stretched skin as purple and tender as a newborn’s, into which every speck of grit from the ruined platform dug in as if they were tiny daggers.

    “Arrgh!” He yelled. “My feet! My feet!”

    As you can imagine, Potero was terrified. He wanted most of all to get himself out of the station as quickly as possible. However, he had no idea how to use these incredible and painful feet, so he positioned himself back on his hands and knees and crawled along like a baby.

    At the exit, where he eventually arrived, other people were milling around. Some of them were also hurt, and all of them were confused and asking for help. However, none of them had enlarged feet like his. Moreover, in their confusion, they kept knocking into his massive toes which caused him excruciating pains.

    Finally, he made it to street level where, to his great relief, he spied a street stall selling slippers. Just the thing for his hurting feet.

    “Do you have any slippers big enough for me?” He asked the man who stood next to the stall.

    “The only slippers I have big enough for your enormous feet are magic slippers, and they cost £200.” The man replied. Pointing to two large, fluffy objects tied to the roof of the stall which looked like clouds.

    “£200! That’s a lot of money for slippers.” Potero exclaimed.

    “You pay extra for the magic, sir.” Said the stall owner defensively.

    “Magic? What do they do?”

    “They float, sir.”

    To Potero, floating slippers sounded exactly like the sort of slippers he wanted. “I’ll take them.” He replied.

    “That’s £400.”

    “£400! What? You thieving wretch. You said they were £200 just now.”

    “They’re £200 each, sir.”

    “Each?”

    “Yes sir, they’re magic slippers, sir. Magic doesn’t come cheap.”

    Potero didn’t want to spend so much money, but he really wanted the slippers to protect his newly painful feet. So he plucked £400 from his back pocket and handed it over to the stall holder. Who detached the slippers from his stall and handed them over.

    When Potero put them on they were oh so very comfortable, cushioning his feet as if they had been made just for him. If someone had told him they had been sewn from real live captured clouds he would have believed them. Which would have been wise, because that’s exactly what they were. 

    If you had been there, standing on the street looking up at Potero, who was at this point wearing the slippers and hanging on to a street lamp to balance himself in them, it would have looked very much like two nimbo cumulus; the fluffy little white clouds you see on a summer’s day, hovering oddly low around the street lamp, but you wouldn't have been able to see Potero standing up on them.

    “Well, try ‘em out then.” The stall owner yelled up to him.

    “What?” Potero called back.

    “Take a step.”

    “What? I can walk in them?”

    “Yes! It’ll be a bit odd, but you’ll soon get used to it.”

    “Won’t I drop?”

    “No.” Lied the man. Who put on his jacket and flipped his stand so it collapsed into a package he could carry, and ran off with it into the underground station. If you had been close enough by at street level you might have spotted the logo of the London Underground, a little red circle split by a horizontal red line on the lapel of his jacket, and heard him mutter ominously; “Mind your step as you leave the train.”

    But Potero wasn’t at street level, he was at the top of the lamp post, still hanging on.

    He stayed there for quite a while, not quite sure of how to start walking. Eventually though, and very tentatively, he let go of the street lamp.

    It was amazing! He found himself bobbing up and down on the spot. It was slightly wobbly, but it felt great. He was totally astonished that the floating slippers were holding his weight.

    Walking felt similar to how it might be to stride through a vat of wobbly jelly. As soon as one foot went up to take a step, the other would sink. It was impossible to walk normally. It was really funny to see and very strange to experience. His arms flailed about.  At first, he really enjoyed it. It felt like he was on a bouncy castle, but he couldn’t pay much attention to where he was going, and quite soon then his feet skidded from under him, and he fell.

    However, instead of falling to the ground, he discovered that the slippers held him safely but upside down. He was now hanging in the air and everything around him was red and blurred.

    At first he thought he had hit his head and he was seeing red because there was blood in his eyes. But, after feeling all over his body, he realised that it was because he was suspended near the glowing red sign of the London Underground, that red circle split with a line which marked the entrance to the very station he had just escaped.

    He reached out for it, thinking it would be better to hold onto something, but as he did so the slippers swung him away. He tried again, and then again, but each time they wouldn’t let him grab it.

    It seemed the slippers simply wanted to fly. They let Potero reach for the sign one last pointless time, then they whisked him away up over the streets, the roofs and the towers of the city of London, and into the cold stratosphere far above the earth, where he soon froze into a very dead, Potero-shaped icicle. 

    Finally, the cloud slippers unsheathed themselves neatly from his feet and let him drop into the sea with a small and unnoticed splash. Then they slowly became vapour, and once they had disappeared no visible trace of Potero was left.

The end.